Our first stop was Ifrane, and what a shock to the system. Firstly, it was FREEZING (ok, so it was probably 45 degrees, but I was not ready for that. I don’t think I actually processed it when I was told it might be snowing there.) Secondly, it looked like Switzerland (It was built as a French Colonial vacation town.) It was beautiful, but it also seemed out of place in this country.
In Azrou, a little town nearby, we had 15 mins to explore (yep, that was often how the trip worked) and I climbed a giant mount of rocks with a crown on top. We saw men some hundred feet below us waving, so we waved back. Then,one of them lifted a foot in the air as a challenge (I was standing at the very tip top) which I of course took. We also saw little boys in a park doing flips.
Next we drove through the cedar forest in the mountains we saw Barbary apes. They were so fuzzy and awkward looking.
Erin and I made a book club on the bus. I had read The Sand Child in the village and convinced her to read it. In the story, a man has seven daughters and decides to raise the eighth as a son. It’s so interesting and twisted and I felt like I didn’t have a very deep understanding and wanted to discus. When Erin started marking her book with sticky notes, I knew I had a best friend.
We went to the Sahara (Did you know that sahara means desert in Arabic? And har means hot) and rode camels into the sunset. My favorite part was running and jumping and tumbling and rolling down the dunes. The sand was unbelievably soft and a really beautiful orange-brown. Unfortunately, the dune I was on was experiencing a minor sandstorm (the wind was coming up from behind and blowing sand everywhere. The next morning when we woke up at 5am and climbed the dunes by moonlight to watch the sunset from the top. The dunes are absolutely surreal, and the soft light right before sunrise and the bright orange right after made them look spectacular.
On the road, I saw desert and barren, rocky mountains and mesas that would suddenly open into green oasis valleys. The oasis is such a romanticized idea, but the reality is pretty surprising and spectacular—a huge forest of green in the middle of endless brown.
The mountains were also surprising—or rather, the road through them was. It was windier than most Colorado mountain roads, but had NO shoulder, often no guardrail, was about as wide as a one-lane road in the US, and to top it off, we were in a giant bus.
Marrakesh is the touristic capital of Morocco,and I had heard so much about how magical it is, but I was a bit disappointed. At one point, when I was walking through the square with a couple of friends, a man approached us with wooden snakes, saying “Buy a snake, scare your boyfriend” and when we ignored him, another shopkeeper said “Sorry, I didn’t know you were lesbians.”
Our last stop was a surftown called Essaouira. It was touristy, but in a much more chill sense—meaning that it was clean and friendly, but didn’t feel like Disneyland. It was a really nice way to end the trip. I spent the afternoon at the beach swimming in the perfectly straight waves, exploring the sand dunes and watching the sunset.
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